“It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 844 of 4756
“If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.”
“One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.”
“Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”
“Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.”
“When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!”
“Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.”
“Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.”
“It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.”
“Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear: the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.”
“Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.”
“Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'”
“We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.”
“We were always around my dad, so he wasn't absentee at all. I don't think it was normal, but it was exciting. You always had lots of creative people around, and my parents took us everywhere.”
“Having a kid, it makes you slow down; when you're walking with a toddler to pick up a leaf it can take a half hour. You've never spent that time looking at a leaf before, having that kind of interaction. So I think it does make you change the way you look things.”
“I think anything you do that's different, that doesn't take the typical approach, invites differing opinions.”
“Every actor I think has got their own number of takes that they like, you know. Some actors like to go all day, you know on the one scene and some actors want to take two takes. I personally like four.”
“I think the goal is to make a well written scene seem like it's improvised and/or to come up with things that you find in the room that you couldn't have known until you get into the real situation, just try to improve things as you go along.”
“I thought that the grounded-ish nature of the first Iron Man and where I think the success of it was based was I think people got excited that this was a technologically possible occurrence; and didn't Obama order an Iron Man?”
“I guess the main thing is, you unconsciously take things for granted, and you think the audience is with you, because you're with yourself.”